Alan Gilbert’s Fall Guest Conducting Engagements in America and Europe

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After an extraordinarily busy start to his new season with the New York Philharmonic, Alan Gilbert hits the road in October for a series of guest conducting engagements with major orchestras in the U.S. and Europe. His debut with the Munich Philharmonic (Oct 16, 18, 19) will include his first performance of Janácek’s thrilling Sinfonietta. A program of Haydn and Beethoven with the San Francisco Symphony (Oct 27–29) will also include Dutilleux’s L’arbre des songes, a violin concerto to be performed by Renaud Capuçon. Concerts with the Cleveland Orchestra (Nov 11–13) will feature Schoenberg’s hauntingly beautiful Pelleas und Melisande, which Gilbert conducted to great acclaim in his first season as Music Director of the New York Philharmonic, and last season with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France. With Hamburg’s NDR Symphony Orchestra (Dec 1–3), Gilbert will conduct – among other works – Brahms’s grandly scaled Piano Concerto No. 2, with guest soloist Yefim Bronfman. In two Paris concerts (Dec 9 and 10) Gilbert will lead the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France in his own arrangement of music from Wagner’s Ring cycle. Gilbert’s next concerts with the New York Philharmonic will take place in Canada on November 4 and 5 at the Maison symphonique de Montréal – the new home of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. Gilbert and the Philharmonic are back in New York December 16 and 17, for further performances in CONTACT!, the Philharmonic’s new-music series.

Even before the curtain went up on Gilbert’s third season as Music Director of the New York Philharmonic – a gala event on September 21 with soprano Deborah Voigt, broadcast nationally on PBS – Gilbert led the orchestra in three special concerts: A Concert for New York, a free, nationally and internationally televised performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, “Resurrection,” given in remembrance and renewal on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of 9/11; a free concert in New York’s Central Park, with pop superstar Andrea Bocelli and special guests; and a performance of Walton’s Henry V: A Shakespeare Scenario, featuring narration by legendary stage and screen actor Christopher Plummer. Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony was reprised for the orchestra’s first subscription program of the season, and was enthusiastically acclaimed. In the Financial Times, critic Martin Bernheimer gave the concert a five-star (out of five) review, calling it “glorious business”:

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